Playwright Sam Shepard wrote and directed this
bizarre combination of western film revisionism and Greek tragedy.
Silent Tongue (Tantoo Cardinal) is a mute Kiowa who is raped
by Eamon McCree (Alan Bates), the owner of the Kickapoo Traveling
Medicine Show. Eamon attempts to make up for his crime by marrying
her, hoping for forgiveness. Instead, Silent Tongue enacts a
bitter retribution through her two daughters, Awbonnie (Sheila
Tousey) and (Velada (Jeri Arredondo). Awbonnie, as the film begins,
has already died, but her grieving husband Talbot (River Phoenix)
refuses to let her go, dragging around her corpse. To assuage
Talbot, his father Prescott (Richard Harris) sets out to purchase
Velada from Eamon, thinking that only Awbonnie's sister can replace
her in Talbot's eyes. But Velada's half-brother Reeves (Dermot
Mulroney) protests the attempted transaction. As a result, Prescott
kidnaps Velada and flees, with not only Reeves and Eamon chasing
him, but also Awbonnie's ghost. - Paul Brenner, All Movie
Guide
Love, death and shame in
the Old West
Review, Rolling Stone 676, February 24, 1994
 A HAUNTING TALE of love, death and shame in
the Old West, "Silent Tongue" is not a great film,
but it aspires to be. You can feel Shepard trying to cut through
conventions and get at something deep-rooted, vital and affecting.
Leave it to River Phoenix to choose "Silent Tongue,"
a demanding chunk of Shepard frontier poetry that shuns pretty-boy
posturing. The first sight of Phoenix comes as a shock. In filthy
clothes, with cracked lips and a crazed stare, he sits under
a tree with a rifle, keeping guard by a fire. You can hear the
flames crackle against the cold air. Seeing a bird in flight,
he shoots it, rips off its feathers and climbs the tree where
he places the prize plumage on the rotting corpse of an Indian
woman tied to the branches. He then bends tenderly to kiss her,
his eyes burning with grief.
 It's an astounding opening scene,
mysterious and rending. Shepard films the scene without words.
Gradually, the film fills in more details about this obsessed
character. His name is Talbot Roe, the backward son of Prescott
Roe (Richard Harris), an earnest plainsman who will do anything
for his only child. Last spring, the elder Roe bought his son
a wife, the half-breed Awbonnie (Sheila Tousey), in exchange
for three horses. The seller was Awbonnie's Irish father, Eamon
McCree (Alan Bates), the perpetually soused proprietor of the
Kickapoo Traveling Medicine Show. A few weeks earlier, Awbonnie
died in childbirth (the baby with her), leaving Talbot dazed
from sorrow and his father determined to buy him a replacement
wife, Awbonnie's sister, Velada (Jeri Arredondo). "He's
fallen even deeper inside himself," Prescott tells McCree.
"He refuses to eat or speak. He just stands over her corpse
like a lost soul."
Harris
gives a touching and unusually understated performance. Bates,
who could have hammed to the hilt, finds a twisted wit in McCree.
"I am not a bottomless pit of daughters," he tells
Roe, though McCree's greed knows no bounds. His son, Reeves (Dermot
Mulroney), knows that McCree values money and horseflesh more
than him or the two daughters McCree fathered by the Indian woman
Silent Tongue (Tantoo Cardinal). When Reeves objects to the inhuman
sale of his half sister, his father says, "She's an Indian
-- they were born to suffer."
In flashbacks, we see Reeves as
a child, watching in horror as his father rapes Silent Tongue,
so named after her tongue was cut out for lying to a Kiowa chief.
Though McCree marries the woman he violates, she eventually deserts
him and their daughters to return to her tribe. McCree, tormented
by dreams of a vengeful Silent Tongue, hesitates about selling
his second daughter. That prompts Prescott to kidnap Valeda to
save his son.
 In more than 40 plays, including
"True West," "Fool for Love" and the Pulitzer
Prizewinning "Buried Child," Shepard has shown a passionate
concern for the disintegration of the family and the corruption
of the pioneer spirit. That concern deepens in "Silent Tongue,"
his second film as a director -- following the less successful
"Far North," in 1988. McCree and his collection of
acrobats, fire-eaters and freaks have made a business of hawking
illusions. Though Shepard sees the medicine show as symbolic
of the snake oil that trespassers like McCree have been selling
American Indians, the film's thrust is less political than spiritual.
Two clowns, played by Bill Irwin and David Shiner, tell comic
ghost stories to the audience with musical accompaniment by the
Red Clay Ramblers. But out on the plains, Talbot is living a
ghost story for real.
As Talbot
keeps watch, the ghost of Awbonnie -- a streak of white paint
running down her angry face -- appears to rebuke him: "You're
a dog, a low dog, to tie me here out of your selfish fear of
aloneness." Tousey, a Stockbridge-Munsee and Menominee Indian
who costarred with Shepard in "Thunderheart," is a
fierce wonder in the role. Awbonnie wants Talbot to throw her
body in the fire so her spirit can be free. But even when this
ghost knocks him down, chokes him, puts a curse on his father
and cajoles him to kill himself, Talbot clings tenaciously to
what is now only a mound of decomposing flesh.
During rehearsals, Shepard tied
Phoenix to Tousey with twine to reinforce the bond he wanted
Phoenix to feel. Phoenix rewards him with a performance of almost
unbearable poignancy. When Talbot's father and Velada arrive,
pursued through Kiowa country by McCree and his son, the ghost
also threatens them. It is Prescott who finally breaks his son's
hold on Awbonnie and the past. For Roe, who's learned to respect,
if not understand, Indian spiritualism, there is hope. For McCree,
who sees only banshees on the "demon" plains, there
is no absolution.
Shepard has freighted the film
with so much metaphoric weight that it threatens to topple over.
But as Talbot keeps his lonely vigil -- strikingly photographed
by Jack Conroy -- Shepard gets close to the mythical transcendence
he seeks. Talbot, his mind in a fever, finds reality and fantasy
sliding into each other until he achieves a kind of peace. It's
a perilous journey into letting go, and Phoenix never falters.
It's a fitting capper to an extraordinary career. Serving Shepard
and the film, Phoenix was, as ever, quietly devastating.
Review, Washington Post
by Rita Kempley, Staff Writer
April 15, 1994
 SAM
SHEPARD MUST have seen himself as Sophocles in a saddle when
it came to the making of "Silent Tongue," the writer-director's
spellbinding mess of Greco-Roman, Irish and Native American myth,
revisionist chic and theatrical tradition. In this Greek tragedy
on the Great Plains, Shepard effectively illustrates the tragic
clash between European and aboriginal cultures that came with
Western expansion.
Shepard's West, like Clint Eastwood's
in "Unforgiven," is populated by scoundrels and madmen.
His heroes are tarnished and worn, and his story turns on avenging
a woman wronged. In this case, it's Silent Tongue (Tantoo Cardinal),
a mute Kiowa, who is raped by a cowardly Irishman, Eamon McCree
(Alan Bates), who knows she can't scream. The owner of the Kickapoo
Traveling Medicine Show, McCree believes he has earned Silent
Tongue's forgiveness by marrying her, but he has badly underestimated
the extent of her rage.
Though she is the title character,
Silent Tongue's part is a small one, for she relies upon her
two beautiful daughters -- Awbonnie (Sheila Tousey) and Velada
(Jeri Arredondo) -- to carry out a plan of vengeance. Awbonnie,
who is already dead when the story begins, takes the form of
a powerful banshee. Half-woman, half-buzzard, she has been tethered
to this plane by her grieving husband, Talbot (River Phoenix),
who clings to the corpse of his beloved late wife.
Believing that only Velada McCree
can replace her sister, Talbot's father (Richard Harris) sets
out to purchase her, as he did Awbonnie, from her father. Velada's
half-brother (Dermot Mulroney) protests, Talbot's father kidnaps
Velada and flees with the McCrees and Awbonnie's vicious ghost
in pursuit.
 Luckily all of this has been presaged
by the medicine show players, a Greek chorus whose songs and
skits echo, prepare and otherwise help audiences make sense of
the complex narrative with its references to "La Strada,"
"The Wizard of Oz," the Greco-Roman myth of sisters
Philomela and Procne and the bluegrass-flavored music of the
troupe's string band.
After the
comics have told their jokes, the dwarfs have finished their
tumbling and the petrified man has stared back at the crowd in
stoniness, McCree pitches the snake oil of which he himself is
an aficionado. Full of booze and blarney, he tells of how he
managed to escaped a tribe of warriors with both the secret elixir
and his skin. Bates plays the scene at full bray. His uncanny
resemblance to a complete jackass is all but inescapable as he
bellows bawdy tunes from astride one on his way to reclaim Velada.
Harris, on the other hand, is
unusually becalmed as the father tormented by his son's overwhelming
grief. Phoenix, in his next to last performance, is convincingly
feral as a husband haunted by his lost love and by her ferocious
Kabuki-like ghost, both enthusiastically played by Tousey, a
Native American actress. Restraint is little in demand under
Shepard's direction.
Sometimes, as in Bruce Beresford's
film of the Canadian frontier, "Black Robe," the land
itself steals the scene -- a golden main beneath whose amber
waves lie buried the dreams and bones of good and bad alike.
© The Washington Post
Review: A Sorry Thing
by John Hartl, film.com
TWO YEARS ON the shelf, "Silent Tongue"
is the movie River Phoenix made before "The Thing Called
Love" (his last completed film) and "Dark Blood"
(which was abandoned when he died). Why did TriMark Pictures
bother to make a theater stop on the way to video?
There are aesthetic justifications.
One is Jack Conroy's wide-screen cinematography, which strategically
places Sam Shepard's hapless characters in a lonely, expansive
Western landscape. The visual design is one of the few things
that works in "Silent Tongue," and it's likely to be
seriously compromised in the video release.
Another reason: the eccentric
performances, which are likely to cause even more puzzlement
on a small screen. Alan Bates, playing the alcoholic proprietor
of the Kickapoo Traveling Medicine Show, attacks the part with
a mixture of shameless ham and poignant regret. The latter quality
is likely to be overwhelmed when the scale of Bates' acting is
reduced, and that's a shame.
Richard Harris, atypically restrained,
may simply recede into the background on smaller screens, while
the subtlety of Phoenix's work may not come across. Although
he has a one-note supporting role, he projects anguish and self-destructive
fervor with eerie commitment; one scene in which he nearly blows
his face off with a shotgun is particularly hard to watch in
light of recent events.
The year is 1873, the setting
a dusty New Mexico desert. Phoenix plays the inconsolable widower
of an Indian woman who died giving birth to his child. Harris
is his desperate father, who bought the woman from her rapist
father (Bates) and makes an offer to buy her sister (Jerri Arredondo)
as a replacement.
"I'm not a bottomless pit
of daughters," says Bates, who regards her as essential
for his show. "I'm not my sister," says Arredondo.
People keep protesting by stating the obvious, then behaving
as if they'd forgotten their objections.
"Silent Tongue" is more
interesting than "Far North," Shepard's dim 1988 debut
as a director, but he still has pacing problems, he seems not
to want to tell a coherent story, and his handling of actors
is erratic and wasteful (Bill Irwin and Tantoo Cardinal have
almost nothing to do). Everyone here has been better under other
circumstances, yet Phoenix and Bates have moments that are not
quite like anything else they've done.
The first two-thirds of the movie
hangs together, especially if you accept the appearances of the
dead woman's ghost (Sheila Tousey) as projections of the survivors'
guilt. But Shepard loses his way with a finale goes off in too
many directions at once.
"This is a sorry thing,"
says Dermot Mulroney, who plays Bates' son. Surely this wasn't
intended as a commentary on the movie, but that's how it plays.
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